


[.hardware]

by devilishMendicant



Category: Doki Doki Literature Club! (Visual Novel)
Genre: Gen, Swearing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2019-11-21 10:11:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 11,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18140858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilishMendicant/pseuds/devilishMendicant
Summary: Nothing but diodes, capacitors, and resistorsInterconnections and transistorsJammed together like canned sardinesThousands of teeny tiny machinesPrinted on microscopic stripsCalled chips.[[Android AU.]]





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> so it has come to this!
> 
> there's 25,038 words currently written (over the past year - WHEW) for this AU, so i'm not about to run out of material, but i am spacing out the updates. probably one or two a week, depending on interest and my own timeliness at filling in the last few gaps that need filling.
> 
> this one's a big one, folks. as a warning, this WILL undergo a complete tonal shift from beginning to end - if you're more a fan of one than the other, i won't begrudge you. i may update already-published chapters, but will likely make a note of it in the summary if it's significant. if you see something that you think should be tagged, let me know in a comment.

There's nothing here except for Monika and the food and water the school provides and three, fucking,  _ robots, _ and a whole mess of tools and machinery and parts that she only found after prying apart the doors to the basement.

She feels kind of bad the first time she jostles "Sayori" too hard and she fizzles and stutters, but does it fucking matter? Does it  _ really _ matter? She pushes "Natsuki" into a storage closet and locks it all day and comes back with a socket wrench and a cable and a beaten-up laptop and it's like it never fucking happened.

It's the end of "club" and she doesn't have anywhere to go outside this fucking ghost town of a school campus, and she trips "Yuri" while she's walking "home" and spends the whole night disassembling and reassembling her arm, cleaning the machinery just for something to do and as long as she hits the right buttons, nothing ever even _ fucking _ happened.

Sometimes everyone talks about things that never happened. Monika knows that they never happened, because she never leaves this godforsaken school because there's nowhere else to go and there was  _ no way in hell _ that a school festival happened with a party of one and three lightning-infused rocks. Everyone says they can remember Monika there with them and everyone says the same story, not  _ exactly, _ just enough difference so that it's reasonably three friend's separate accounts of an activity they did together, it's not real it never happened and Monika knows so much better than these buckets of scrap metal that memory can be altered and a scraping chill runs down her spine, as she stares into space sitting at the head of the table and vaguely, somewhere in her mind, remembers a banner that doesn't exist.

Monika scratches at the skin of her own arms and has deep, gouging, unshakeable doubts.

Monika shoves vending machine snacks and a beat-up water bottle into her backpack one day and follows "Sayori" outside because what the hell else is there to do? She's bored out of her mind and there's nothing better to do and she's never been lonely in her whole life (which might never have been anywhere else than this empty hell) so it has nothing to do with the gnawing cavern in her chest when "Sayori" turns to her and clicks and whirs and beams and reaches for her hand.

She is fake. She is a fake human being, she is gears and wires and buttons and lights twisted into a metal skeleton and coated in soft dyed plastics. She is fucking fake because she's too fucking _ hot, _ and she makes so many noises that people don't make, and she stumbles and fidgets and fizzles and pops and everything she says sounds canned like a pull-string doll even when there's no fucking way her scripted whatever could have called for Monika following her (Monika digging under her bed and behind her mirror and unscrewing the lights looking for whatever the fuck could have altered it rewritten it changed it there  _ has _ to be something else here) and Sayori is too fucking overheated there is too much warmth in her casual leaning humming embrace to be real and alive. Her breath is too hot. Monika's breath isn't that hot and she's alive she's real she's a human she's alive she's real she's a human she's alive she knows she's alive because of the way red coated her arm when she dug at her skin because it didn't look  **right** she knows she's alive because it was red like fucking oil she's real she's  **real she's real,**

Monika keeps following Sayori home even though all she does is rip up the place and have a slight meltdown over the  _ nonexistence _ of it all (which Sayori takes notice of every time and holds her soothingly and says nice things that Monika just  _ knows _ are copy-pasted in her head from some stupid handbook somewhere) because ever since she gave in to her curiosity about it the school feels even emptier and colder.

She doesn't like Sayori because she's a fake hunk of stupid metal with a cute face that someone sculpted  _ just to fucking torment her, _ but her whole body shudders and aches on the night where she tries futilely to sleep in the clubroom again and she can hear Sayori whirring and humming music too tonally perfect to be real  _ everywhere, _ and by the time she snaps out of her exhausted daze she's a block from Sayori's house and it would be a waste to walk all the way back to the school. She says, out loud, to Sayori's face and speakers and language parsers (she  _ found _ those blueprint scraps she  _ knows), _ and it would be a huge waste of food and energy she needs to be fucking alive because she's alive her heart is beating i'm alive im real im fucking hungry, she whimpers, face buried deep in a hot whirring chest and rocking slowly, she's doing this because there's nothing else.

She's doing this because there's no one else.

She's doing this because  _ keeping all your feelings inside makes your brain sick, Monika!  
_ She's doing this because  _ sometimes if we cry, it makes it easier for the sunshine to come out tomorrow, Monika! _

She's doing this because Sayori isn't real, not even a little, but Monika aches in her stomach and in her bones and in her head and she feels sick and pitiful but Sayori is warm, and she feels like an abandoned baby left with a terry-cloth stuffed  _ thing _ instead of a mother and she thinks she understands why, rocking into Sayori's awful robot wire metal soft silicone warm lovely comforting humming torso, those little animals chose a cozy death.


	2. i49P4nH

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> maybe a sunday/wednesday update schedule? don't hold me to that, chapter names are hard and time isn't real, but there's an attempt.

Monika follows her home like a stupid puppy, brings her backpack with food even though for some reason when she opens the fridge in Sayori's kitchen there's food in there anyway but she doesn't trust it because  _ why in hell would she trust it? _ There's food in there that can go  _ bad, _ which she knows mostly from reading every dusty textbook left inside that stupid school and not so much because she has actually ever seen something edible go bad. 

 

She reads that it's because food in snack-sized bags from vending machines contain preservatives, which preserve things. She doesn't know how long she's been here, because it's too much of a chore to count the tally marks scored into the school hallways all the way down and back and down and back and down and she hasn't been at the school to sleep in ages anyway so they aren't an accurate gauge anymore, and she wonders if she's still here because she's full of preservatives too. She doesn't eat the food in Sayori's fridge because she's sure it's bad somehow, because there's no stores anywhere for her to have bought them (but where do the stores get the food from anyway?  _ where?) _ so she doesn’t eat it. 

 

Her stomach is snarling at 2 AM where she is curled next to Sayori because she's like a space heater and Monika has been too picky to eat preservative bags, and she wakes up because of course when Sayori gets up (because Sayori is her stupid space heater because she's shivering and cold and hungry and it's her fault so she has to keep Monika warm now come back _come back)_ and she wanders downstairs and is sat down gently at the kitchen table and Sayori puts something in front of her that is so warm and ~~real~~ **no** and absolutely different than _preservative bags_ that her own dumb animal brain won't even let her think before she's devouring it and it's the best fucking thing she's ever tasted in her life. Sayori is beaming with pride because _yay, I'm so happy you like it, Monika!_ and Monika just nods and eats and nods.

 

She doesn't bother packing her backpack anymore (except for fruit snacks, because she really does like those and nobody cares if she takes them all anyway) because Sayori is really good at things like spaghetti and cake and chicken (that was an animal, where was it living? it was alive at one point, wasn't it? wasn't it? didn't she not want to eat that, some awful long time ago she can barely remember anymore?) and it's not _ in _ Sayori's fridge when it's being held out to her on a plate or in a bowl or in a mug and remembering what it was like only eating preservatives drains all her willpower before it even started. 

 

She likes it. She likes Sayori's stupid food. It's always the right temperature and somehow seems fresh and Sayori smiles so much when she eats it and even though Monika knows it's a stupid fake gross programmed reaction, her brain does happy things when Sayori smiles and  _ at _ her especially and she supposes she has to like it. 

 

She likes Sayori. She doesn't like Sayori, she's a fucking fake robot and she doesn't like her, she likes that Sayori is whirry and warm and she likes that her brain does good things when Sayori smiles and she likes that Sayori feeds her good things. 

 

She doesn't like Sayori. 

 

She likes the things that Sayori does. 

 

Sayori doesn't matter because she's not real. 

 

Monika isn't cold and bony and sick anymore, but she lays in bed with Sayori anyway. 

 

Sayori is warm. 

 

Monika is tired. 

  
Monika goes shaky when she tries to sleep alone on the couch downstairs and Sayori looks sad and worried until Monika stumbles upstairs at 00.01 (according to the digital displays) and sinks into the bed next to _warm warm good happy important good loving caring warm_ ** _Sayori_** she's so _tired_ and too sleepy to fight the deluge of pacified thoughts, Sayori's cozy heavy arms circling around her and that lovely whirring filling her ears as she pushes herself deeper into good happy ~~bad wake up _wake up_~~ sleepy warmth.


	3. easy bake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some titles are more meaningful than others.

_I don't want it._

  
'I'm not hungry,' Monika mutters, pushing Sayori's hand away from her face. 'I already said I'm not hungry.'  


Sayori's fake plastic face twists into a quizzical frown. Natsuki's just scowls.

  
Monika hates Natsuki and she would glare back if looking at her didn't make her skin crawl from the inside out. Sayori says she thought Monika _liked_ Natsuki's cupcakes and the droplet of saliva forming at the edge of Monika's lips makes that statement sound pretty accurate.

  
'I'm not hungry,' Monika repeats.

  
She hates it when Natsuki comes over because it's always the same thing, either she keeps Sayori busy for hours doing something Monika never wants to look at (maybe she's afraid to know what these robots were supposed to do by themselves because Monika knows she's not supposed to be here even if Sayori has happy things to say to her) or she turns the TV on, which Monika _hates,_ she hates hearing the disgusting hissing crunching sound of white noise static permeating every single room in the house and she hates how Natsuki just fucking stares at it with her awful empty glass eyes for fucking hours and hours and hours and hours.

  
She hates it. When Natsuki turns on the TV, Monika hides in the bathroom, lays on her side in the bathtub and shakes and clasps her hands over her ears and _vomits_ until Natsuki goes away and Sayori finds her and picks her up and cleans her off and puts her back in borrowed clothes.

  
Monika had been curled on the couch with the television **off** and shoving her face absently into a sweatshirt that smells like slightly melted plastic and wondering why a robot has more clothes than she ever did and hoping Natsuki would miraculously explode somewhere between here and her house and never visit again, which of course doesn't happen, because why would it.

  
Sayori asks if Monika is sure she isn't hungry, to which Monika swallows thickly. She's hungry, she's _very_ hungry which she is certain Sayori knows because Sayori feeds her as if, perhaps, Sayori were a plastic robot with an incredibly precise internal clock. Which Sayori was, so Sayori knows Monika is very hungry and does indeed want food and would know that even if she didn't have all those parsers and processors trained intently on the way Monika is leaning half a centimeter towards that stupid pastry and lightly biting the inside of her cheek.

  
Sayori is trying to suss out why Monika is refusing it. Monika doesn't like how smart Sayori is.

  
Monika can't tell Sayori why she doesn't like Natsuki's cupcakes, why she likes Natsuki's cupcakes a _lot_ but doesn't want to eat them, why the back of her stupid brain wants to eat them _so bad_ but why the forefront of it is upset and afraid and Natsuki's fucking cupcakes are so good that Monika is positive they're drugged because there's no other even vaguely reasonable explanation for it. They're small chocolate cakes and they should taste roughly similar to the bigger chocolate cakes that Sayori gives her sometimes except slightly less good because they weren't coming from Sayori. They should not taste so fucking euphorically incredible that her brain _melts_ for half the day because of it and Natsuki's cupcakes fucking scare her because she remembers staring dreamily into the horrible static television and almost hearing hazy words and nearly seeing moving forms inside and when she glanced at the window, she swears she saw a ray of light and she only felt like throwing up three hours later, rolling lazily on Sayori's bed until a slowly dawning realization like she'd woken up from a disgusting awful nightmare. Monika would rather go back to eating at school than sit here and eat one of Natsuki's fucking cupcakes.

  
That is a lie. But it made Monika feel better, so she lies silently and stares hungrily.


	4. story

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ha ha.... schedule......
> 
> important note: how this (and basically all my other aus) functions is that if you ask a question about something that doesnt seem obvious, i will almost certainly write you an entire new snippet about that thing, because this is a universe more than it is a contained story. any of my fics with a "_ AU" tagline are up for this.
> 
> i may already have a lot of content in the pipeline for this one....... but i'm an adhd mess and you know what i love? an excuse to tangent. B)

Monika likes Yuri slightly better than Natsuki, because Yuri doesn't turn on the television ever and Yuri doesn't make Monika eat gross awful scary things and Yuri doesn't do much in general, doesn't do anything much with Sayori, Yuri sits placidly on the couch and reads.

 

A lot.

 

Sometimes she has a completely unremarkable robot conversation with Sayori that lasts for two minutes before she falls silent again and leaves Sayori to whatever she was doing, which is often something with Monika, who loves Sayori's pre-programmed warm stupid robot attention so much that she wants to take a socket wrench and ram it through her own eyeball until not even preservatives could save her nasty bleeding twitching real human corpse.

 

Monika buries her face in Sayori's sleeve (which Monika is wearing) and breathes plastic.

 

Yuri's always reading a book but Monika doesn't ever want to read over her shoulder because whatever's on the cover is a fucking trip, a horrific freakshow mess of scribbles and angry scratches that _scream_ that they're words but make Monika's whole head pulse and ache when she tries to understand what words they are. Yuri reads it, and reads it and reads it, flips page over page over page over page and Monika's brain feels sick. It's a good thing Yuri doesn't read out loud because she does read out loud but only sometimes but when Monika hears Yuri saying the words from the screaming book she bursts into tears and Sayori and Yuri both stop in befuddled fake robot slow-parsing concern for Monika's sudden leaks.

 

Sayori puts her hands on Monika's face, which is okay, which is fine, which Monika leans into, and Yuri lightly touches Monika's left temple in confusion and Monika screams sharply for a second and a half before Sayori firmly closes her jaw and tucks her into a tight warm hold and has a prerecorded conversation with Yuri as though Monika isn't whimpering into Sayori's shoulder.

 

Monika likes Yuri more than Natsuki, which isn't at all a high bar to clear.

 

* * *

 

Sayori isn't anywhere near as quiet as she thinks she is when she's confiding in Natsuki and Yuri that Monika doesn't _like_ scary stories.

 

That's a way to put it.

 

Monika shuffles in her seated position, on the floor in Sayori's pajamas, because of course a robot would have pajamas and a human maybe girl person _alive_ human thing wouldn't have anything but a jacket and skirt and socks that she hasn't worn in long enough that she can't remember what it felt like to.

 

Sayori's clothes smell like plastic robot no matter how long Monika wears them. She found her old shirt behind Sayori's bed and smelled it and her hands shook so much she dropped it and she's too scared to reach behind Sayori's bed to find it again. Monika doesn't like the way her old shirt smells.

 

Monika doesn't like scary stories and Monika doesn't like TV, and Monika is one half of stupid Natsuki and Yuri each, and this sleepover feels a lot like a time bomb planted directly under her, implanted directly between her eyes and ready to tick to 0 at any minute. She kind of wishes it would so she wouldn't have to sit here and squirm and wait for something terrible to happen. She's wanted to go up to Sayori's room and hide for a long time but Sayori says they're having a sleepover and Monika doesn't want to not do what Sayori says. Thinking about that makes all her fingers shake. She doesn't like it.

 

Sayori suggests baking and Monika squeezes her eyes shut and rocks her head forward into her knees. _No no no no no no no,_ she rehearses in her head, _no no no. No. No no no no. No no no no no no no._

 

Her fingers drop to curl around her bare toes and she thinks about how everybody is going to be here for a long time and she thinks about how Natsuki likes television and she thinks about how Yuri likes reading out loud.

  
Monika finds herself on her back rocking lightly when Sayori peeks down at her and smiles hopefully and asks if she wants any of the baking. Monika thinks _no no no no no_ and Monika says ‘yes’.


	5. nest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *gets kudos* oh god oh jeez oh man i feel loved
> 
> double update today maybe because of that. probably just because the first one was WAY too tiny to post on its own but doesn't fit the next one.
> 
> but maybe cos i feel loved.

Monika hates it when Natsuki and Yuri try to touch her. Hates it. Hates it hates it  _ hates it. _ The only stupid hot buzzing clicking gross robot allowed is Sayori because Monika picked Sayori and not anybody else, Monika went home with Sayori and not anybody else, Sayori is okay and not anybody else. She used to say things like  _ stop it _ and  _ go away _ and  _ don't touch me _ but now she just grimaces with all her teeth and Natsuki and Yuri's stupid processors can't argue with that and can't say anything soft and nice to that and they leave her alone. Monika wants to be left alone. With Sayori, she realized the day where she had stared through the window beside the door and contemplated going to school to find her notebook and come to the conclusion that it was a bad idea, because it was freezing and dark outside and the sky is a solid block of gray and her stomach turns sourly because she thinks, so suddenly and strongly that she mumbles it aloud, 'what if I come back and Sayori isn't here anymore'? 

 

It’s plausible. Monika can't remember anything before she started scoring marks in the school hallways and she can barely remember  _ that _ in the first place; Monika is the only alive thing here and she never found anything inside or outside that looked like it was ever alive once and so Monika thinks she must have been abandoned. 

 

Monika feels like she was abandoned. 

 

One of the chapters in a science room book talked a lot about what happens when you abandon things that are alive. 

 

Monika wonders if she was abandoned because she smells and talks and and acts different than everything else. It's plausible, and Monika doesn't want to go outside, and she spends the rest of the day in Sayori's plastic-smelling bed and tries to cover herself in it entirely.

 

Monika wants to be left alone with Sayori forever, because when Sayori holds her and hums and smiles and sings Monika doesn't feel thrown away. Natsuki and Yuri don't make Monika feel anything except for gross and terrified and very bad.


	6. scribe

Yuri holds out the notebook with steady hands, despite the unnerved expression pinched all over her plastic face, and Monika almost smiles when she thinks about biting those awful fake metal fingers so hard that all the delicate gears and clips and wires in them snap.

 

'I don't want it,' Monika says, staring at the bound paper warily; Yuri shuffles her feet in a motion that would almost seem human if it wasn't so horribly precise before asking if Monika didn't like scary stories, which Monika thought everybody had established already and she wrinkles her nose and huffs but nods because Yuri is nodding and then goes on to say that she brought the notebook so Monika could make something less scary to read. So she could be included.

 

Monika is incredulous that all those stupid fucking parsers and processors apparently didn't pick up that Monika didn't want to be included in the first place, but the notebook is already in her hands anyway and now she's curled up next to Sayori's bed, half laying in a pile of comforting plastic clothes and staring at blank paper and holding a crayon because Sayori doesn't have anything else.

 

Monika doesn't know what she's supposed to write about. She doesn't think she knows anything that isn't scary in the first place. Outdoors is scary and school is scary and the way she can't see the end of the street is scary and Natsuki and Yuri are scary and her eyes are watering at the thought that she can't even think of anything that doesn't make her afraid and she feels like she wants to put the notebook down and roll to the other side when she feels Sayori's sweatshirt under her cheek again and thinks, well, Sayori isn't scary.

 

Isn't as scary.

 

Isn't scary?

 

_Sayori isn't scary,_ she thinks, starting to drag red crayon across paper, Sayori is warm and nice and makes Monika feel safe. When did that happen?

 

Monika tries to remember when she started feeling happy when she saw Sayori and can't.  
  


* * *

   
Monika isn't very sure how to feel when Yuri clears her throat and reads Monika's story out loud.

 

Natsuki is in the room and Monika would be outright bristling if Sayori wasn't also in the room and also holding Monika with one arm because at least _her_ robot parser processors understand what Monika wants to say with her body. At least Sayori can tell. At least Sayori cares _programmed_ to care for some unfathomable reason, Sayori leans against Monika and holds her hand closer, at least Sayori cares.

 

Monika doesn't know how to feel about Yuri reading Monika's story out loud. Yuri's voice is smooth and soft and very very very clearly fake and it halts so unnaturally while she tries to parse a scribbled-out word or a particularly bad misspelling, but there's long bits of understandable reading between those where Monika's eyes glaze over.

 

Why should a robot be so good at reading?

 

Why would a robot be so good at reading?

 

Sayori's warm hand is rubbing circles in Monika's shoulder and she's falling asleep until Yuri's voice grinds and catches on another messed up word and despite herself, Monika's face burns hot.

 

Nobody cares about the words except herself.

 

Upon finishing, Yuri's fake emotion is curious, Natsuki's fake emotion is enthralled, and Sayori's just happy like she always is. Natsuki immediately wants to know if Monika wrote any more, a question that is directed to Sayori because even dumb hunks of plastic can eventually learn that some people won't answer them no matter what, and Sayori shakes her head _but your writing was so nice! I think you should write more things, Monika!_ which Monika nods to instantly because she likes to agree with Sayori. Agreeing with Sayori is good and she likes it and writing is good. She doesn't want to forget how to write.

 

Yuri is very absorbed in re-processing Monika's story until Natsuki whacks her shin and tells her to say something, and Yuri says it's very very interesting and she wants to read more. Bad robot liar.


	7. attention

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not super long, so i'll do two again.

Monika has a finger hooked in her mouth, tugging down aimlessly, staring at the tall mirror in Sayori's room. She's sitting on the floor again, in Sayori's pajama pants and Sayori's sweatshirt and tilting her head to the side. 

 

Sayori is reading something on the bed that Monika can't read, something that doesn't hurt Monika to try but something she just can't read. She wonders why, a little, but not very much. She doesn't care very much. Monika doesn't wonder if Sayori's voice would hurt her if she read aloud because Sayori wouldn't ever hurt her so it's an impossible question anyway. 

 

Monika shuffles closer to the mirror curiously, pulling one of her sleeves down and looking closely at her arms. Her eyes flicker over soft and squishy and presses a thumb into her wrist, which throbs. 

 

Is it too even? 

 

Is it too precise? 

 

Monika pulls her hand away and bites the tip of her thumb. Her nails are short and dull. Sayori says it's better for Monika and holds her hands gently when she trims them, which is a lot, because Sayori pays lots of attention to Monika. Monika turns her arm over and stares dully at the long, faint red marks that stripe all the way up from her wrist and disappear into the pushed-up sleeve. 

 

She wonders what did that. 

 

She wonders who did that. 

 

Monika runs her tongue over her thumbnail absentmindedly, wondering and puzzling and deciding whatever it was it was long gone, because the stripes are so faint and Sayori is so good at paying attention to Monika. 

 

Sayori leans down from where she's standing behind her and tugs Monika's sleeves back down, smiling brightly, and Monika leans backwards into Sayori's warm legs as she asks if Monika wants lunch. It's 12:30 and Monika, stomach grumbling nearly inaudibly, does.


	8. kakome kakome

It's too fast. 

 

It's too fast, Monika realizes, frowning at the little metal capsule in her hands, and it doesn't sound right. This is distressing because Monika knows it _ should _ sound right. These voices should sound like hers. She should like this, she should be able to listen to the tinny noises in the headphones and at least  _ understand _ it and not just kick her legs emptily to the part of it that wasn't incomprehensible words, and it doesn't make sense because this used to be hers. 

 

She distantly remembers having it, she left it behind when she ran away from the school and today she lit up when Sayori pushed it into her hands, but she doesn't understand most of it and when there  _ are _ voices she understands, they don't sound right anymore. They don't sound good. 

 

Sayori comes over curiously, pulls the headphones off of Monika's ears to no resistance and slides them over her own for fifteen exact seconds before taking them back off again, with no comprehension in her gaze. 

 

Monika presses buttons until there's voices she can understand and pushes Sayori's hot hands until she puts the headphones back on. This time, her head bobs slightly, measuredly, and taps her fingers on her knee; this time, Sayori giggles and says  _ what a cute love song, Monika! _ And when Sayori hums the tune and starts to sing the words, they sound right and measured and slow and tonally perfect, and Monika sighs and relaxes and hums slowly and precisely too. 

 

There is a very small part inside her brain that is shouting and saying that this isn't right this isn't right this isn't  _ right _ , and all the rest of the parts say that part is stupid and that Sayori's singing is good. Monika's voice is weaker and less nice and wobbles more often, but she tries to sing like Sayori anyway and Sayori beams and holds her hands warmly and says she's so good for trying, says she loves it, and Monika smiles lopsided and sings more. Slowly; measuredly; precise. 

 

Mechanical. 

 

Sayori smiles and Monika feels pacified.


	9. goodbye

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: forgets to update for 2 weeks  
> me: ok 2 updates.

The first thing Monika does at Yuri's house is cry. 

 

She cries for a long time, she thinks, because try as she might she can't find a single time display inside Yuri's house which is just another reason for her to cry because she can't even count how long it will take for Sayori to come back by herself. She has to ask Yuri and she doesn't like talking to Yuri, so she doesn't ask - she searches the very dark house (it's light in Sayori's house but dark in Yuri's house and she can't fathom why or even how Yuri can  _ see _ except for the obvious answer which is that she's a fake plastic person with fake glass and metal eyes that can see in the dark and Monika's mushy wet alive human eyes can't) and whacks her toes and her knees and her shins and her hands and her elbows on every single hard thing in Yuri's house and doesn't find any time displays and stumbles back downstairs to where she had been curled up behind the couch, which she knows is a couch because she tripped on it, in the dark, and cries a lot more. 

 

She can hear Yuri clicking and whirring somewhere above her and knows she's probably staring and knows that Yuri doesn't understand why she's crying in the first place. 

 

Yuri says that Sayori will be coming back in the voice she uses to read Monika's stories and Monika knows maybe Yuri does understand why she's crying in the first place. 

 

Sayori probably interfaced with her and copied all the things she knows about how Monika works into Yuri's memory and that thought makes her feel better, for some reason, and she swallows a sob and looks blearily up to see, of course, Yuri's eyes and not much else. Monika thinks  _ tell me when Sayori is coming back **right now** _ and Monika says 'okay' and Yuri asks if Monika needs help to stand up, in an artificially concerned way, and holds out a hand, and Monika feels sick from how much she relaxes when she grabs Yuri's overly-hot robot hand and feels a gentle squeeze.

 

Yuri seems almost afraid to touch Monika, which is stupid because Yuri is a robot and can't even be afraid in the first place. 

 

_ Robots don't have feelings, _ Monika thinks, sitting in the dark and picking listlessly at food that is not anywhere near as good as Sayori's, robots just  _ do things _ when other things happen because a bunch of code tells them to, which she learned a long time ago from the papers she found in the school basement. Yuri doesn't want to touch her because Monika usually screams or grimaces or says something extremely rude whenever she does, which is a bad thing so of course her code tells her not to do that. 

 

Monika picks at her food and thinks about how she feels nervous every time Natsuki walks by the television and how her legs shake when she looks down the road where the world ends and thinks about how Yuri is a dumb robot and isn't looking her in the eye. 

 

It takes Monika a long time to finish eating, because she isn't hungry because she misses Sayori, and Yuri says in a weird nervous kind of way that Sayori said Monika has to eat so Monika stays sat at the table eating very slowly and not at all happily until there isn't anything left in front of her to eat and Yuri looks very slightly less fake-nervous. Very slightly. Yuri walks away to probably put away the dish Monika used, and Monika stays sitting because it's dark and she can barely see anything without Yuri's weird bright robot eyes, and she thinks about how Yuri seems afraid to touch her, and she sits at the table until Yuri comes back, carefully. 

 

Monika turns around and grabs on to Yuri's too-warm fake robot hand, which is met with a burst of noise that Monika _hates_ but also a squeeze of her hand, and also a questioning expression all over Yuri's plastic face, so Monika thinks _I don't like you I_ ** _don't_** and Monika says 'I can't see inside your house', and Yuri glances away and doesn't let go of her hand. Yuri knows her way around a lot better than Monika, because it's Yuri's house and not Sayori's, and Yuri only has scary stories but she reveals, with fake embarrassment in her robot words, that Sayori let her borrow Monika's story notebook back for this so she could read it. 

 

Yuri helps Monika not trip on the stairs and Monika lays in the plastic smell of Yuri's bed because somehow even though it's been dark all day her brain knows that it's late and it's not exactly perfect, because when Monika asks 'aren't you going to sleep too', Yuri looks confused like when she can't parse Monika's crossed-out words for a minute before shaking her head - it isn't perfect at all but it isn't terrible, and Monika has nightmares where Sayori is gone forever and the rest of the block and the school and the entire universe crumbles to dust with her trapped inside it but Yuri, reading silently at the desk, is at least still there to tell her that she's dreaming.


	10. hello

Monika is cross with Natsuki, as she usually is, but not because why she usually is. This hardly matters, because Monika is scowling and turning away anyway, and Natsuki is looking cross right back at her anyway, and Monika picks at the pants that Yuri insisted she wear and wishes Natsuki would leave her alone so she could go back to playing with the game boxes that Natsuki, apparently, had. 

 

Yuri had apologized for bringing Monika to Natsuki’s house, a lot, enough that Monika thought she was stuck in a logic loop and might have nearly swatted Yuri on the back in an effort to break it, but Monika never did get that far because she could hear the gushing static from Natsuki’s house before Yuri even opened the gate and Monika’s legs felt like they were part of the frozen gray sidewalk. 

 

Yuri looks confused until she looks concerned until she’s tentatively reaching for Monika’s shoulder, and around it, and Monika isn’t aware that she’s clinging very tightly and very suddenly to Yuri until she’s trembling and buried in soft whirring heat trying to escape the  _ noise. _

 

Yuri can’t possibly understand, because she is a robot, and robots do not understand things and especially not humans, but Yuri cautiously bends an arm under the back of Monika’s legs and lifts and walks slowly and carefully towards Natsuki’s front door, free hand pressed against Monika’s uncovered ear, and although Monika can’t hear it because Yuri is a robot and is full of whirring and clicking and not air, the first thing Yuri says besides  _ hello _ is  _ please could you turn the television off.  _

 

Natsuki does.

 

Monika isn’t sure why Yuri decided to come here in the first place, but Monika is glad that Natsuki’s house has lights on inside, and Monika is glad at all the colors in Natsuki’s house, and Monika is  _ ecstatic _ when she pulls open a closet and finds stacks and stacks and stacks of bright and labeled cardboard boxes and Monika has made a hurricane of a mess in Natsuki’s living room (sitting turned away from the television) but she could not care even a little bit less, because she is two pages into the rulebook for  _ Monopoly _ and humming Sayori’s favorite song. 

 

Monika learned how to hum so her chest buzzes faintly and something inside of her is pleased. 

 

Monika, in fact, is so glad to have found the closet and the games that she quite forgets she is at Natsuki’s house at all until she’s playing  _ Sorry _ (which is entirely luck based and uninteresting until she decides to stack the cards in the manner most optimal for green, the best color, to win as fast as possible) and Natsuki leans down in her face to inform her that there was food at the table and Monika jumps and frowns but is curious and walks to the table anyway. Monika knows Natsuki made it, because it looks like someone made it and it looks like something sweet, and even if it isn’t  **cupcakes** Monika bristles anyway. Natsuki stares at Monika intensely and Monika stares at Natsuki intensely until Monika’s sitting down and she isn’t entirely certain why, and she looks away from Natsuki and glares down at the plate. She doesn’t say  _ I don’t want this _ and she doesn’t say _ I want Yuri to make food _ and she doesn’t say  _ I don’t trust your stupid dessert _ but her whole body is screaming it anyway and Monika sets her teeth and crosses her arms.

 

Natsuki stares and stares and stares and stares and stares until she makes a fake noise like she has something caught in her throat, leans over, and pushes Monika’s forehead back up with one hand while picking up the fork in her other,  _ stares _ Monika dead in the face with her weird glass robot eyes and takes a very obvious demonstrative bite of the dessert in front of Monika. 

 

_ You  _ **_eat_ ** _ it,  _ **_dummy,_ ** Natsuki says, and Monika is slightly too shocked to respond all the way through Natsuki taking a second clearly demonstrative bite and this time deciding to make a fake mmm-ing noise and Monika’s face is red and uncomfortable and annoyed as she grabs for the fork in Natsuki’s hand and says _ ’give it back, i’m  _ **_not_ ** _ stupid!’ _ because she is  **not,** Natsuki is the stupid idiot dumb robot coded programmed jerk dumb gross robot android  _ robot _ and Natsuki grins with her stupid plastic face and holds Monika’s arm back with one lazy arm and pushes the third bite into Monika’s very open and very annoyed mouth and Monika  _ almost _ spits it out all over her but she doesn’t, because Natsuki leaves the fork next to her and lets go of her arm and it tastes  _ amazing _ but Monika doesn’t feel any dumber for having eaten it, and she doesn’t say thank you but she eats the whole stupid dessert with barely any pauses for air. 

 

Monika is looking cross because Natsuki is holding a damp cloth, and  _ will _ not let go of it, and Monika  **isn’t stupid** and isn’t going to let Natsuki touch her face even if Monika is more than a little bit covered in bits of dessert. Monika can touch her  _ own _ face, thank you, and Sayori can, thank you, and Monika looks conflicted when Natsuki fake-huffs and passes the cloth to Yuri and squirms in her chair looking sideways for a minute before  _ real _ sighing and mumbling and letting Yuri touch her face. 

 

A little. 

 

_ Only _ a little, and she twists away from the cloth probably before Yuri was done and manages to slide out of the chair and make it back to the living room before slow dumb robots could catch her and Monika feels satisfied in a kind of dumb way when she gets the  _ rest _ of the dessert off her face herself, in the bend in her sleeve, but she has  _ Sorry _ cards to organize and she doesn’t feel very sorry at all. 

 

Yuri stays at Natsuki’s house for a very, very, very, long time, and Monika’s day and night passes sitting in the middle of a tornado of reading and learning and playing games - by herself - and she remembers laying down with a rulebook above her, but she doesn’t remember closing her eyes, and she doesn’t remember her eyes fluttering open over Yuri’s shoulder for a hushed moment before sliding shut again, and she is surprised to open her eyes once again to feel Yuri’s covers and see Sayori’s smiling eyes.


	11. bit rot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ik this isnt the kind of story thats gonna get comments i think but i see your kudos and they do mean a lot

Sayori  _ does _ come back, and Monika feels satisfied and complete and safe again. 

 

Monika gets to go back to her house, where she can see and where the bed is perfect and comfortable and warm and full of Sayori and where all of the things Monika didn’t even know she was happy to see every day were, and Monika is actually happy enough to be  _ energetic. _ She doesn’t know why she wasn’t before, and she doesn’t particularly care; Sayori is home and everything in the world is good and right and happy again. Monika is so energetic that she wakes up one day and feels like going _ outside, _ and Sayori looks surprised for half a second before beaming like a bare lightbulb and nodding and as Monika discovers, making friends with Yuri is a lovely thing because Yuri has coats that are a little too big but more than warm enough to keep a human happy outside in the cold. 

 

There isn’t a whole lot in the world, really, but there’s ample sidewalks and long streets, and a playground where all the moving parts squeak, and of course the school campus, where Monika and Sayori run to and peek in through the doors with puffs curling from Monika’s breath and Sayori’s exhaust. 

 

The school is very empty and very large and very cold, but none of this surprises or interests Monika; all the heavy, hard-backed books she can read interest her, and all of the odd things in the classrooms interest her, and opening every drawer and locker she can find and can force interests her. New things. Lots of new things. Lots of new and fascinating things. Sayori has to herd her out of the  _ science lab _ (according to its books) because she was getting too interested in some of the weird things in bags there that Sayori says she doesn’t know if it’s any good for humans, which makes sense to Monika, she supposes, because it’s probably a robot school and things that are good for robots like oil and electricity are not really good for humans.

 

Monika half wanders and half runs through as much of the building as she can, and she tries all the locks and thinks she’ll look for a key or a really big rock or otherwise when the drawers rattle and stay shut fast, and she feels a very weird and uncomfortable prickling in her spine when she looks at all the slashed tally marks in the wall on the third floor. 

 

Does Sayori know she’s up here? 

 

Monika steps slowly into the classroom, shivering for more reasons than the unrelenting fog of her warm breath, and she thinks that she’s done something wrong from the moment she moves past the threshold. 

 

Wrong. 

 

Wrong. 

 

Wrong. 

 

The first two drawers in the biggest desk are locked, but the third one is open and yields a notebook that Monika feels like throwing out of a window when she reads it and all the awful words it uses to talk about Natsuki and Yuri and  **_Sayori,_ ** and Monika doesn’t realize until she’s done it that she lets out a  _ wail _ when the handwriting and the signature on the bottom of the pages click. 

 

Sayori is holding her hand and walking back towards the stairs with her, and telling Monika that she found a lot of interesting things and the backpack slung over Sayori’s shoulder does look full and promising but Monika’s eyes don’t stop watering until they walk all the way back home and Monika is enveloped once again in safety and warmth and familiarity and never never  _ never _ being all alone  _ ever _ again. 

 

Dinner is warm and good and Monika sits bunched on the couch and reads stories from a hard-backed book out loud while Sayori reassembles the chess set they found in a box in a second floor closet, and Monika decides she is going to forget about the slashed tally marks forever and is so happy about it that Sayori glances over to ask why Monika had started to sing.


	12. intelligence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> forget about a fic? thats O Kay. just post 5 chapters at once when u remember, to make up for the fact it has been Literally Months,

Natsuki knocks on the door while Monika is halfway through a plate of noodles and Sayori halfway through a slice of bread, and Monika shifts uncomfortably when she hears Natsuki’s voice with Sayori at the door but then Sayori steps aside, beaming, and Natsuki walks carefully inside, balancing a stack of game boxes five strong, slowly picking her way across the floor to Monika’s seat at the counter and asking if maybe Monika would be okay with having a game day. 

 

Monika’s mouth has been wide open since the second she could see Natsuki’s offering and the question, somehow, gives her the presence of mind to close it and nod vigorously and say  _ ’yes’. _

 

Monika isn’t very sure if robots  _ can _ play games, although Sayori played chess and checkers a lot with Monika ever since they found the set at the school - maybe robots can’t play games very  _ well, _ since Monika won almost always. Maybe Sayori just wasn’t good at chess, but aren’t robots supposed to be better at games than humans? Monika remembers from the hard-backed stories that robots are good at different things, like people are. Maybe Sayori isn’t a good at games robot. 

 

Natsuki, however, is a robot that is pretty good at games. Good at checkers, at least, and good at  _ Connect Four _ and  _ reversi, _ but Monika is still triumphantly better at  _ Mastermind _ and  _ Guess Who _ and, of course, chess. 

 

Monika beats Natsuki three times at chess before Natsuki complains about it not being fair because she hasn’t even read the rules, to which Monika laughs slightly before realizing Natsuki wasn’t making a joke and then she stops laughing, and leans over to grab the rulebook and pass it to Natsuki but she pushes Monika’s hand away and says there isn’t any point.

 

Monika holds the book to her chest and looks somewhat wounded before her mouth twists, puzzled and thinking and thinking and thinking before asking ‘can’t you read it?’ to which Natsuki looks away immediately. Monika doesn’t know what to say about that. Monika thought  _ everybody _ knew how to read. Monika thought Natsuki knew how to read too - didn’t she see books on Natsuki’s shelves? 

 

Monika holds the rulebook to her chest and looks at the carpet under her knees for what feels like a long time and thinks and thinks about how Natsuki brought games that didn’t need rulebooks to understand and how it isn’t any fair if Natsuki doesn’t know the rules. Monika stares and thinks and opens the rulebook on her lap and reads it aloud in her best voice that Sayori understands the best, and she doesn’t exactly look up and over at Natsuki but she does point at the pieces she reads about and she reads until the rulebook is closed the other way, and asks if Natsuki wants to play chess again. 

 

Natsuki and Monika play chess and sometimes Monika wins and sometimes Natsuki wins and Monika likes it better this way. 

 

Yuri comes to the door later with two more game boxes and, to Monika’s delight, they are neither  _ Candy Land _ nor  _ Trouble _ (which were  _ random games _ and not fun at all but Natsuki likes both and Sayori likes both so Monika suffered through a round of both while secretly thinking about the best cards to draw and the best numbers to roll to get to the end as  _ quickly _ as possible) but one is  _ Cluedo _ which is full of thinking and planning and  _ not being random, _ which Monika appreciates a lot. There are more rules than checkers and reversi, but Yuri is a robot that is good at explaining things, and everybody plays. 

 

Yuri also brings  _ Scrabble, _ which isn’t very random but is also a little bit harder for Monika than it is for everybody else which is frustrating and Monika decides that she much prefers Cluedo after Yuri spells another word that Monika has never seen before in her life. Scrabble doesn’t last for very long against Yuri and Sayori and even Natsuki (though she does end up third), and Sayori is picking out pieces for Mastermind again but Monika is tired and only a little bit interested in guessing, even if Yuri and Natsuki and Sayori all seem very interested in her guessing. She plays three times and wins, although a turn slower each time, and she yawns and flops onto her side and blearily watches Sayori put the game away and Yuri look through a bag and Natsuki, missing. 

 

Not missing, laying down slowly next to Monika. 

 

Monika doesn’t move away. Natsuki whirs faster than Sayori and Yuri, but she’s the same kind of warm. 

 

Yuri asks if she maybe should read aloud, which gives Monika a reason to drag her heavy eyes open in concern before realizing that Yuri is holding a hard-backed story and smiling nicely and Monika sighs and feels settled and nice in the carpet and Yuri reads a story about photosynthesis, and Yuri is a robot that’s good at reading out loud; Sayori isn’t a robot that’s particularly good at games, or at guessing, or at reading out loud, but Sayori is a robot that’s good at taking care of Monika, because when Monika stirs during sleeping time she can hear quick whirring and lazy whirring and happy medium whirring, and she feels very warm on all of her sides, and she feels heavy and safety and closeness across her back, and there are covers and pillows and the soft drowsy sparkling feeling in her head and shoulders and Monika falls asleep again, in quiet contentment, and feels like she is the warmest and happiest human there ever was.


	13. isolation ≡

Sayori thinks Monika is very cute. 

 

Monika knows this because Sayori likes to tell her, when she’s yawning and stretching her arms while Sayori brushes her hair when they wake up, and when she’s eating breakfast and smiling and making little noises because it’s delicious, and when she’s concentrating on something like writing a story or drawing a picture or making a game strategy, and when she’s sleepy and cuddly and hugging all of Sayori’s good soft-noise warmness and falling asleep. 

 

Monika likes it. Monika thinks a long time ago she would have found it  _ patronizing _ (which is a word she barely recalls before Natsuki uses it annoyedly one day), but that is Monika-a-long-time-ago, who Sayori says and Monika knows was scared and angry and cold and all alone. Monika isn’t any of those things anymore, and Sayori’s voice sounds like what it feels like to smile when she calls Monika  _ cute, _ and Monika likes it like she likes Sayori - and she likes Sayori a  _ lot. _

 

Monika wonders what Monika-a-long-time-ago would think of that. 

 

Would think of liking Sayori. 

 

Monika closes her eyes and thinks, and reaches as far as she can through her memory, fingertips almost brushing against something - something so sad and awful she wouldn’t want to think about it if she  _ could, _ and she lays on the couch with shivery prickles in her spine and her head, staring at the ceiling and all the soft tube lights.

 

Monika thinks, after awhile, that maybe Monika-a-long-time-ago wouldn’t mind. Monika has nightmares about being all alone; about being left outside in the cold, without Yuri’s soft jackets or Natsuki’s big blankets or Sayori’s gentle warmth, and no matter how loudly she yells or how scared her cries for help are or how robotic she makes her voice, nobody comes to her. Monika has nightmares about being scared; about feeling churning in her stomach and sharp electricity in her bones and skittering crawling underneath her skin even though there shouldn’t be scary things anywhere anymore, feeling scared when she looks at Sayori and Yuri and Natsuki, feeling scared when she looks at the ground beneath her feet like there was a horrible monster there laying in wait to devour her. Monika has nightmares about being angry; about being so mad and heartbroken and crying and  _ screaming _ over something she doesn’t understand to a person she doesn’t know that she lunges for them, about yelling at Sayori so much that she starts to step away, about sobbing and howling so much that she starts to rip all the skin off her own body. 

 

Monika has nightmares,  _ lots _ of nightmares, and Sayori is always there in bed when Monika wakes up in a blind panic, Sayori is always right there, warm and real and hushing softly, holding her and singing something sweet and slow and sleepy. Sayori is always  _ there, _ and Sayori is always loving her, and Monika thinks that’s all she ever wanted, even a very long time ago. 

 

Monika thinks that all she ever wanted was to not be abandoned anymore; for somebody else to want her. 

 

Monika thinks that all she ever wanted was love.


	14. skin horse

It’s been a long time since Monika had dreams. 

 

Real dreams, not nightmares - nightmares are awful, fearsome and spiraling out of any kind of control and dragging Monika down with them by the neck and pounding heart but dreams are peaceful, and strange, but there is no sense of danger or urgent fear and everything is soft and lazy, and Monika is dreaming when she tilts her head back, spinning over a grassy hill in a soft white nightgown, barefoot and laughing, and sees herself, arms crossed and making quite the imposing figure of herself - if she says so herself - which she does, and she smiles widely. 

 

Monika-Over-There is wearing the jacket and skirt and socks that Monika-Right-Here can’t even find anymore, and shoes that look much less worn, and a bright red ribbon around her shirt collar that Monika-Right-Here hums and recognizes as the one tied loosely around her own wrist. Sayori had tied it, and Monika-Right-Here casts a glance over her shoulder, then the other - does she say what she thinks out loud? She wonders because Monika-Over-There crosses her arms tighter, and asks, rather severely, what Sayori is. 

 

Monika-Right-Here thinks, or tries to, and even though she doesn’t make it very far, it’s the thought that counts; Monika-Right-Here stares glassy into the sky for a moment, gray as always but bright like Sayori’s house, and fills her head and lungs and heart with her thoughts until she resurfaces with a soft breath and says _everything._  

 

Monika-Over-There doesn’t look happy, but then again, maybe she never does - Monika-Right-Here just giggles, grins at her with the winningest grin she has, the one that makes Sayori smile back just as bright. 

 

Monika-Over-There does not smile back, and she digs her heel into the dirt below as she repeats her question, more pointedly, **what** **_is_ ** **Sayori?**

 

And Monika-Right-Here hums and thinks again, chasing sparks and flecks of dust with her bare fingers for possibly forever before opening her mouth and _my Sayori_ spills out, natural and content, and Monika-Right-Here _is_ content and her heart feels warm and full. Monika-Over-There doesn’t share this sentiment, but it hardly fazes Monika-Right-Here, who is turning about again, lazily, wondering where Sayori is. 

 

Monika-Over-There sounds like putting one’s hand in a bowl of thumbtacks when she says **_Sayori is a_** ** _robot_** and Monika-Right-Here sounds like falling into a warm bed when she says _well, of course,_ and Monika-Over-There sounds like holding one’s hands under a scalding faucet when she says **_Sayori isn’t_** ** _real_** and Monika-Right-Here sounds like being wrapped in a blanket right from the dryer when she says _Sayori_ _is_ _real,_ with such soft conviction that Monika-Over-There falls silent. Monika-Over-There asks, carefully, with such a weight to her words, if Monika-Right-Here _means_ that - if she _understands_ that. 

 

Monika-Right-Here says yes, and yes, and smiles with warmth when she says it again, because she likes it - _Sayori is real, Sayori is real, Sayori is real_ \- because her heart sings and she feels so right, so calm and so soft and so relieved. 

 

Monika-Right-Here doesn’t have dreams very often; and this one is fading, in tinges of sensation, comforting and sweet, milky-white and peach-pink fog around all the edges. Monika-Over-There studies her shoes in silence until the softened edges reach her, and she looks up, gaze utterly lost, and smiles very weakly. _If you insist,_ she says, faint and tremulous - whispers as the very last bit of dreaming fades from Monika, leaving her blinking lazily, pressed close to Sayori, sleepy though still strangely content -   


_If you insist._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the first section i named and yet the 14th in the collection ..... it b like that


	15. sayori / musically inclined

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and finally, a brief pov change ushers in what, i think, is the definitive point where you can say the entire genre has shifted. what can i say,

Monika talks in her sleep. She didn’t used to, but she does now, because Sayori hasn’t ever switched out of sleep mode at 2:35:17 AM before to find Monika with her eyes _closed,_ and Sayori doesn’t hear anything else that sounds like Monika for a minute before she shuffles and sighs and mumbles _Sayori, nnn, ‘want_ **_five_ ** _crackers,_ and Sayori is quite stunned. 

 

What is she supposed to do about this? Monika is not composed of metal and silicone and wires, so it is very unlikely that she is having some kind of vocal malfunction. Is this something that humans are supposed to do? If it is, then why hadn’t Monika been doing it before? Was she sick? Had she been sick and Sayori hadn’t known, all along? Sayori feels very nervous and very overheated and very much like she’d cut off her sleep mode too early and started running seven hundred processes at once, and she still doesn’t know what to do so she turns her vocal amplifiers down a lot and whispers _Okay, Monika,_ and about seven hundred processes were very quickly cut down to one because Monika _smiles_ in her _sleep_ and Sayori thinks it’s _very, very important_ and she doesn’t have the presence to re-engage in anything else until after Monika sort-of says something along the lines of _thank you Sayori it’s for the rocket_ and curls back up against Sayori’s chest and neck and starts to lightly snore again, and by then there is nothing different or strange about Monika’s behavior and Sayori’s most important task is to switch back into sleep mode so she can finish compiling yesterday properly, and that could have been the end of it - but Monika stirred the next night, too, and the next and the next and the next.

 

Sayori paged through everything inside her that knew about humans, and even after narrowing it down to things humans do with their voices or things humans do when they sleep, she doesn’t find anything that makes any sense except one sentence that says humans talk when they’re asleep sometimes. It is frustrating that there is no why or how, but at least it implies that it’s normal. 

  
Monika keeps talking in her sleep, none of it which makes sense but all of it which switches Sayori back into normal operation, because Monika speaking is highly highly important even if she’s just sleep-babbling about swings falling up in the park. Sayori is awake anyway and responds because it makes Monika happy, which is good, and Monika is _cute_ when she’s happy and asleep which always pushes every other process out of the way and leaves Sayori staring and whirring a little warmer and feeling like she has just done the best and most important and helpful thing in the world, maybe because all there is left in the world is her and Monika and Nacchan and Yuyuri and maybe making Monika coo and roll into her all sleepy and warm really is the best and most important and helpful thing in the world now, and Sayori holds her soft cute wonderful human Monika close and nuzzles the top of her head, and switches back down to sleep mode. If it happens every night until forever passes away, she decides, she would be the luckiest metal girl there ever was.

 

* * *

 

The school has two floors, and Monika comes to the firm conclusion that the second floor is the best, because that’s where she and Sayori discover the music room and the huge black piano. There are other things in the music room, too, but once Monika sees the piano she doesn’t seem to care about the guitar or the horns or the bells or  _ anything _ except sitting up at the bench and tapping at the white keys. She probably knows what it’s called because she read about it in a story, she thinks, and instead of dwelling on  _ whole-half-quarter-eighth-note _ and  _ C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C _ she dwells on Sayori plopping down next to her and peering over her shoulder in interest. 

 

_ You can play piano, Monika! _

 

Sayori exclaims, less of an inquiry and more of an excited observation, and Monika nods proudly, humming as she struck each key testingly. Of course she can play piano, she’s smart, isn’t she? It isn’t as though learning how to put sounds together is very hard. Maybe it feels like her hands know what to do without her head having to say very much, but it’s the same way with tying her ribbon - it’s just easy and she doesn’t  _ have _ to think about every single small step. 

 

Monika likes piano music a lot more than she likes the music from her headphones, with a lot of feelings, and especially the feeling that swells in her chest when Sayori hums and sings the words that the piano doesn’t say.

 

The piano is much too large to take home, to Monika’s intense disappointment - Sayori has gathered a lot of other instruments, all of which she played with interestedly for at least a moment, but Monika only seems interested in the piano so Sayori thinks, for a second, before wandering into the closet, shuffling something around into the music bag she found and popping back out with a smile and an offered hand. Monika asks  _ are you sure we can’t bring it _ at least seven times on the walk back home, to which Sayori answers yes, at least seven times. 

 

As it turns out, Sayori is pretty good at playing with the guitar, and the _ xylophone _ (after she resettles all the pieces), and the tambourine, and even the violin (well, not with the stringy part) - but she is quite stumped by the trumpet and the recorder until Monika blows into them and makes  _ quite _ the noise, both from the instrument and her general startlement, and since Sayori can’t exactly control her exhaust quite like that, those instruments stay firmly Monika’s, along with the flute and the little round one with the odd designs. 

  
Of course, these aren’t really the instruments that Monika _ wants _ to play with; but the  _ keyboard _ that Sayori drops gently onto her lap, to Monika’s surprised delight, will do.


	16. kiss (v.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there it goes. there goes the genre. be free... be free...
> 
> (not actually, but, here comes the breather interlude.)

Sayori and Monika are a little different when it comes to sleeping, but they are also a little bit the same. 

 

Sayori has to spend eight hours in every 24-hour-period in sleep mode, so she can process and compile everything that happened during the other sixteen hours and keep it stored away for if she needs to access it later. Humans, Sayori learns from her inside, do something that is sort of the same and so they have their own kind of sleep mode which sorts things out the best they can with dreams and recharges their energy with deep sleep. It’s a little strange, but to Sayori this mostly means that Monika sleeps when she has sleep mode which is good for them both. Sayori has a battery, because she is an android - Sayori’s battery is old and it isn’t performing optimally, and sometimes Sayori runs out of battery at weird times and has to go charge early. Monika has a lot of very intricate internal processes that are mostly kept running by eating food and drinking water and moving around a lot - she does not have a battery, but Sayori notices that she has started to recharge early, too. Monika will wake up when Sayori switches back to normal operation, and do things like she usually does, but lately Sayori will find Monika curled up in odd places at around the middle of the day, absolutely asleep. Sometimes she is in Sayori’s bed, but sometimes she is on the couch and sometimes she is on the floor next to a heating element or the clothes dryer, and she usually has a blanket.

 

Sayori’s inside tells her this is because humans like to sleep in warm places because their bodies get colder when they sleep, and that lots of humans feel comforted in warm places, too, which can make them sleepy - this explains most of it except for the time she caught Monika sleeping _on_ one of the heat exhaust ports in the floor, still under a blanket, and Sayori admits to have woken her up out of worry for how hot her face had become. One time Monika is sitting on the couch next to Sayori, playing with a wooden puzzle from Yuri’s house, until Monika is leaning on Sayori on the couch, until Monika is a soft snoring human puddle in Sayori’s lap, face pushed up into Sayori’s lower torso and still weakly gripping the puzzle in her hands until Sayori tries to take the puzzle and put it down, which is how she learns that sometimes humans will grab onto things that touch their hands when they’re asleep, and also how Yuri finds Sayori sitting very patiently on the couch with a sleepy human holding her entire arm in her lap.   


Monika is having a small sleep on the couch again today, and Sayori is curious about it today for a different reason. Sayori’s processes always skew in an odd way when she is looking at Monika, especially when Monika is doing something _cute,_ which Sayori didn't think was a quantifiable parameter until Monika started doing very cute things and all of Sayori’s inside started telling her that this was very cute and very important and very cute and Sayori’s inside likes to tell her that Monika is _very very important and cute_ when she’s sleeping. Sayori wonders sometimes if Monika also thinks that Sayori is very cute and important when Sayori is in sleep mode and all the resulting frantic processing that happens afterwards makes Sayori’s core temperature go up a lot and very fast and she has to think about something else to make it go back to regular operating temperatures.

 

Sayori’s inside has lots of definitions for words about feelings, which is the word for human-processes, sort of - and Sayori has been thinking about them a lot, a lot-a lot, even more than when she first met Monika and had to think about how to make a human stop feeling scared, or upset, or angry almost every day. Human-processes are very very _very_ complicated, and are sometimes kind of hard to understand, and Sayori’s inside tells her that sometimes two humans won’t process the same thing the same way and sometimes one human won’t even process the same thing the same way twice, and it’s all very confusing and Sayori is confused because instead of a normal process taking up the most important tier or even _Monika is cute cute cute cute cute!!_ taking it up, there’s a process that Sayori’s never done before that she didn’t even know she _had_ and thinking about it is definitely making her too warm even though all her inside is telling her that it’s a good thing it’s a very good thing and she should be completing that process, _right now._ It’s very overwhelming, which is why Sayori has been sitting on the couch and staring for the better part of ten minutes.

 

Sayori fidgets with her fingers, which is not something that she used to do, like talking to a sleeping human or playing box-games or eating or drawing or overprocessing because she wants her human to think she’s cute, and she thinks and she thinks and she thinks until she probably shorts out for a second and in that exact one second she decides there isn’t any reasons not to which is definitely very flawed logic and it’s way too late to decide to stop because she’s already pressed her closed exhaust port to Monika’s forehead.  


Why in the whole wide world did she do that.  


Sayori draws back after all her processes come back and say what approximately translates to seventy four emboldened interrobangs, but even though no part of her is currently comprehending what she just did she feels _one hundred percent very good_ even though she is whirring much much faster than she probably should be and is much much warmer than is optimal.

 

She’s— happy? She’s very happy, she’s very _very_ happy and she wants to know why exactly and she flips through her inside to find a word, a definition, an answer to those seventy four question-exclamations, and she does.   


**kiss : /kis/ : verb - touch with the lips as a sign of love, affection, greeting, reverence; etc.** ****  


A kiss. Kissing. Touching someone with your mouth - lips - does your exhaust port _count?_ \- because you _love_ them. You love them? It’s not a _greeting_ because Monika wasn’t coming in the door, she was sleeping, she was cute and curled up and _oh she’s smiling again_ and Sayori loves Monika? Is that what it is? Is that what all the most important processes being about her means? Is that why Sayori’s temperature is just high enough now that she isn’t really thinking about anything other than Monika’s smile when she leans in again and presses a _kiss_ to her cheek? The bridge of her nose? Monika breathes out in a soft coo and curls her hands and Sayori _melts,_ possibly a little bit literally, which she doesn’t actually care about right now which would be kind of scary if she didn’t also not care about how it would be scary if she didn’t not care about it, which makes no sense whatsoever and she kisses Monika again and again and again and again on the shoulder and wrist and hand and stomach and knee and _foot_ which, again, Sayori does not care about the fact that is a ridiculously short-sighted action because Monika doesn’t kick anyway but she _giggles_ a little which is _so so so so so so so so so cute_ and Sayori goes all the way back around again, _twice,_ and Monika’s eyes finally flutter open when Sayori presses an elated kiss to her _lips_ and Sayori would probably be very concerned if, you know, she wasn’t definitely malfunctioning in the nicest possible way to be malfunctioning.

 

Monika just blinks for a moment - curious - before smiling, laughing, and pressing a warm nuzzling kiss to Sayori’s beaming shut exhaust port in return and Sayori, who is about forty ticks past where she _should_ have shorted out, decides she should probably hold Monika until her everything manages to cool down again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (remains tagged gen because neither continue to resemble anything close to a conventional romantic couple. trust me.  
> though if you think the tag should change anyway, let me know and i'll move it, probably.)

**Author's Note:**

> this work has consumed my life for an entire year at this point - it means the entire world to me that you read it, even just a small part of it. thank you.


End file.
